The Fight Read online

  No one in the room had the heart to say no. Ali motioned to a flunky who brought up a purse from which the fighter extracted a sheaf of worked-over pages, handling this literature with the same concentration of his fingertips a poor man brings to counting off a roll of cash. Then he began to read. The Blacks listened with piety, their eyes off on calculations to the side.

  “I have,” said Ali, “a great one-two punch.

  “The one hits a lot, but the two hits a bunch.”

  Everybody snickered. The lyric went on to suggest that Ali was sharp as a razor and Foreman might get cut.

  “When you look at him he will make you sick,

  “Because on his face, you will see nick after nick.”

  Ali finally put the pages away. He waved a hand at the obedient mirth. The poem had been three pages. “How long did it take to write?” he was asked. “Five hours,” he replied — Ali who could talk at the rate of three hundred new words a minute. Since the respect was for the man, for all of the man including the literary talent (just as one might be ready to respect the squeaks Balzac could elicit from a flute if that would prove revelatory of one nerve in Balzac — one nerve, anyway), so came an image of Ali, pencil in hand, composing down there in the depths of Black reverence for rhyme — those mysterious links in the universe of sound: no rhyme ever without its occult reason! Did Ali’s rhymes help to shape the disposition of the future, or did he just sit there after a workout and slowly match one dumb-wit line to the next?

  Ali’s psychic powers were never long removed, however, from any critical situation. “That stuff,” he said, waving his hands, “is just for fun. I got serious poetry I’m applying my mind to.” He looked interested for the first time this day in what he was doing. Now from memory he recited in an earnest voice:

  The words of truth are touching

  The voice of truth is deep

  The law of truth is simple

  On your soul you reap.

  It went on for a good number of lines, and finally ended with, “The soul of truth is God,” an incontestable sentiment to a Jew, Christian, or Muslim, incontestable indeed to anyone but a Manichean like our interviewer. But then the interviewer was already worrying up another aesthetic street. The poem could not possibly be original. Perhaps it was a translation of some piece of devotional Sufi that Ali’s Muslim teachers read to him, after which he might have changed a few of the words. Still, a certain line stayed: “On your soul you reap.” Had one really heard it? Could he have written it? In all of Ali’s twelve years of prophetic boxing doggerel — the poem as worthless as the prediction was often exact: Archie Moore/ is sure/ to hug the floor/ by the end of four — some such scheme! — this line must be the first example in Ali’s voluminous canon of an idea not resolutely antipoetic. For Ali to compose a few words of real poetry would be equal to an intellectual throwing a good punch. Inquiries must be made. Ali, however, could not remember the line out of context. He had to recall the entire poem. Only his memory was not working. Now one felt the weight of punches he had taken this afternoon. Line by line his voice searched aloud for the missing words. It took five minutes. It became in that time another species of endeavor as if the act of recollection might also restore some of the circuits disarranged in the brain that day. With all the joy of an eight-year-old child exhibiting good memory in class, Ali got it back at last. Patience was rewarded. “The law of truth is simple. As you sow, you reap.”

  As you sow, you reap! Ali’s record was intact. He had still to write his first line of poetry.

  The exercise, nonetheless, had awakened him. He began to talk of Foreman, and with gusto. “They think he’s going to beat me?” Ali cried aloud. As if his sense of the universe had been offended, he said with wrath, “Foreman’s nothing but a hard-push puncher. He can’t hit! He’s never knocked a man out. He had Frazier down six times, couldn’t knock him out. He had José Roman, a nobody, down four times, couldn’t knock him out! Norton down four times! That’s not a puncher. Foreman just pushes people down. He can’t give me trouble, he’s got no left hook! Left hooks give me trouble. Sonny Bates knocked me down with a left hook, Norton broke my jaw, Frazier knocked me down with a left hook, but Foreman — he just got slow punches, take a year to get there.” Now Ali stood up and threw round air-pushing punches at the air. “You think that’s going to bother me?” he asked, throwing straight lefts and rights at the interviewer that filled the retina two inches short. “This is going to be the greatest upset in the history of boxing.” Ali was finally animated. “I have an inch and a half over him in reach. That’s a lot. Even a half-inch is an advantage, but an inch and a half is a lot. That’s a lot.”

  It was not unknown that a training camp was designed to manufacture one product — a fighter’s ego. In Muhammad’s camp, however, it was not the absent manager, nor the trainers, nor the sparring partners, nor certainly the gloomy ambience of the camp itself which did the manufacturing. No, the work was done by Ali. He was the product of his own raw material. There was no chance for Foreman as he stated his case. Still, memories stirred of Foreman’s dismantlement of Ken Norton in two rounds. That night, commenting at ringside just after the fight, Ali’s voice had been shrill. When he started to talk to the TV interviewers his first remark — uncharacteristic of Ali — was, “Foreman can hit harder than me.” If Ali had made excuses to himself for his own two long even fights with Norton, such excuses had just been ripped out of his ego. In Caracas that night, directly before his eyes, he had seen a killer. Foreman had been vicious like few men ever seen in the ring. In the second round, as Norton started to go down for the second time, Foreman caught him five times, as quick in the instant as a lion slashing its prey. Maybe Foreman couldn’t hit, but he could execute. That instant must have searched Ali’s entrails.

  Of course, a great fighter will not live with anxiety like other men. He cannot begin to think of how much he can be hurt by another fighter. Then his imagination would not make him more creative but less — there is, after all, endless anxiety available to him. Here at Deer Lake, the order was to bury all dread; in its place Ali breathed forth a baleful self-confidence, monotonous in the extreme. Once again his charm was lost in the declamation of his own worth and the incompetence of his enemy. Yet his alchemy functioned. Somehow, buried anxiety was transmuted to ego. Each day interviewers came, each day he learned about the 2½–1 odds for the first time, and subjected his informants to the same speech, read the same poems, stood up, flashed punches two inches short of their face. If reporters brought tape recorders to capture his words, they could end with the same interview word for word even if their visits were a week apart. One whole horrendous nightmare — Foreman’s extermination of Norton — was being converted, reporter by reporter, poem by poem, same analysis after same analysis — “He’s got a hard-push punch but he can’t hit” — into the reinstallation of Ali’s ego. The funk of terror was being compressed into psychic bricks. What a wall of ego Ali’s will had erected over the years.

  Before leaving, there is an informal tour of the training camp. Deer Lake is already famous in the media for its replicas of slave cabins high on Ali’s hill and the large boulders painted with the names of his opponents, Liston’s name on the rock you see first from the entrance road. Each return to camp has to remind Ali of these boulders. Once these names were fighters to stir panic in the middle of sleep and a chill on awakening. Now they are only names, and the cabins please the eye, Ali’s most of all. Its timbers are dark with the hue of the old railroad bridge from which they were removed; the interior, for fair surprise, is kin to a modest slave cabin. The furniture is simple but antique. The water comes from a hand pump. An old lady with the manners of a dry and decent life might seem the natural inhabitant of Ali’s cabin. Even the four-poster bed with the patchwork quilt seems more to her size than his own. Outside the cabin, however, the philosophical residue of this old lady is obliterated by a hard-top parking area. It is larger than a basketball court, and all the
buildings, large and small, abut it. How much of Ali is here. The subtle taste of the Prince of Heaven come to lead his people collides with the raucous blats of Muhammad’s media sky where the only firmament is asphalt and the stars give off glints in the static.

  2. THE BUMMER

  WITNESS ANOTHER Black man’s taste: It is the Presidential Domain of President Mobutu at Nsele on the banks of the Congo, a compound of white stucco buildings with roads that extend over a thousand acres. A zoo can be found in some recess of its grounds and an Olympic swimming pool. There is a large pagoda at the entrance, begun as a gift from the Nationalist Chinese, but completed as a gift by the Communist Chinese! We are in a curious domain: Nsele! It extends from the highway to the Congo over fields in cultivation, two miles to the Congo, now called the Zaïre, the enormous river here a disappointment for its waters are muddy and congested with floating clumps of hyacinth ripped loose from the banks and thick as carcasses in the water, unromantic as turds. A three-decker riverboat, hybrid between yacht and paddle steamer, is anchored at the dock. The boat is called President Mobutu. Next to it, similar in appearance, is a hospital ship. It is called Mama Mobutu. No surprise. The posters that advertise the fight say “Un cadeau de President Mobutu au peuple Zairois” ​(a gift of President Mobutu to the Zairois people)​ “et un honneur pour l’homme noir” (plus an honor for the Black man). Like a snake around a stick, the name of Mobutu is intertwined in Zaïre with the revolutionary ideal. “A fight between two Blacks in a Black nation, organized by Blacks and seen by the whole world; that is a victory for Mobutism.” So says one of the government’s green and yellow signs on the highway from Nsele to the capital, Kinshasa. A variety of such signs printed in English and French give the motorist a whiz-by-the-eye course in Mobutism. “We want to be free. We don’t want our road toward progress to be impeded; even if we have to forge our way through rock, we will forge it through the rock.” It is better than Burma Shave and certainly a noble sentiment for the vegetation of the Congo, but the interviewer is thinking that after much travel he has come to an unattractive place. Of course, the interviewer is also looking green. He has caught some viral disruption in Cairo before coming to Zaïre and has only been in this country for three miserable days. He will even leave for New York just this afternoon. The fight has been postponed. Foreman has been cut in training. Since it is over the eye, the postponement, while indefinite, can hardly be less than a month. What a bummer! The day he landed in Zaïre was the day he heard the news. His hotel reservations had, of course, been unhonored. There is nothing like failing to find a bed when you land at dawn in an African capital. Much of the morning was lost before he was finally assigned a room at the Memling, famous for its revolutionary history. A decade ago, correspondents lived on its upper stories at a time when protagonists were being executed in the lobby. Blood ran over the lobby floor. But now the Memling looked like itself once more, a mediocre hotel in a tropical town. The famous floor of the lobby was more or less equal again in cleanliness and good feeling to the floor of the Greyhound bus station in Easton, Pennsylvania, and the natives at the desk spoke French like men with artificial larynxes. They were nonetheless as superior in their attitude toward foreigners as any Parisian. What pride in the inability to comprehend your accent! What a lobby to be executed in! The Zairois officials who passed through these precincts wore dark blue lapelless jackets and matching blue pants called aboscos (from the slogan “à bas le costume” — down with formal dress) and that was the approved bureaucratic revolutionary wear. Since some of these officials even spoke English (with accents more tortured than the Japanese — words catapulting from their gut as they popped their eyes) irritation teemed in every dialogue. Between white and Black, arrogance massed against arrogance. The decision of the press was that the Zairois had to be the rudest people in Africa. Quickly, relations between Zairois and visiting whites became mutual detestations. To obtain what one desired, whether a drink, a room, or an airline ticket, a surly Belgian tone was the peremptory voice to offer. If, for example, you hung up the phone after waiting twenty minutes for an answer, be certain the hotel operator would call back to revile you for discommoding him. Then one had to get into the skin of a cultivateur Belgique defining reality to plantation hands. “La connection était im … par … faite!” Manners became so bad that American Blacks were snarling at African Blacks. What a country of old knots and new.

  Worse than that. To be in the Congo for the first time and know its name had been changed. More debilitating than cannibalism was this contribution to anomie. To reach the edge of the “Heart of Darkness,” here at the old capital of Joseph Conrad’s horror, this Kinshasa, once evil Leopoldville, center of slave trade and ivory trade, and to see it through the bilious eyes of a tortured intestine! Was it part of Hemingway’s genius that he could travel with healthy insides? Who had ever wanted so much to be back in New York? If there were charms to Kinshasa, where to find them? The center of town had all the panache of an inland Florida city of seventy or eighty thousand people who somehow missed their boom — a few big buildings looked at a great many little ones. But Kinshasa did not have eighty thousand people. It had a million, and it ran for forty miles around a bend of the Congo, now, yes, the Zaïre. It was no more agreeable than passing through forty miles of truck traffic and car-stained suburbs around Camden or Biloxi. If there was an inner city full of squalor and color called La Cité where natives lived in an endless tumbledown of creeks, lurching dirt roads, nightclubs, wall shops and hovels, our traveler was still too queasy with the internal mismanagement of his life to pay a visit, and thought only of getting home. Of course, living in such duress, the bile-producing emotions proved most satisfactory. What pleasure in the observation that this Black one-party revolutionary state had managed to couple some of the oppressive aspects of communism with the most reprehensible of capitalism. President Mobutu, the seventh (by repute) wealthiest man in the world, had decreed that the only proper term for one Zairois to use in addressing another was “Citoyen.” On his average per-capita income of $70 a year, a Zairois, any Zairois, could still say “Citizen” to the seventh wealthiest man in the world. Small wonder then if the interviewer detested the Presidential Domain. These little white villas (reserved for the press) and the large white Congressional Hall (reserved for the training of the fighters) were a Levittown-on-the-Zaïre. Stucco buildings painted the color of aspirin were set behind lacy decorative open-air walls reminiscent of the worst of Edward Durrell Stone, a full criticism — since even the best of Edward Durrell Stone is equal to taking a cancer pill — no, this pretentious Nsele with its two-mile drive and its hordes of emaciated workers in the watermelon fields (one could pass a thousand Blacks on the road before one glimpsed a man with the faintest suggestion of girth) was a technological confection equal to NASA or Vacaville, a minimum-security prison for the officers of the media and the visiting bureaucrats of the world. One high white and chromium tower with the initials of the party — MPR — stood up as a pillar to mass phallic rectitude. It was a long way from Joseph Conrad and the old horror. Maybe it took a mind as extreme as his own to be ready to argue that the plastic niceties of Edward Durrell Stone were still equal in odium to the Belgian Congo of 1880:

  They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now — nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These moribund shapes were free as air — and nearly as thin. I began to distinguish the gleam of the eyes under the trees. Then, glancing down, I saw a face near my hand. The black bones reclined at full length with one shoulder against the tree, and slowly the eyelids rose and the sunken eyes looked up at me, enormous and vacant, a kind of blind, white flicker in the depths of the orbs, which died out slowly. The man seemed young
— almost a boy — but you know with them it’s hard to tell. I found nothing else to do but to offer him one of my good Swede’s ship’s biscuits I had in my pocket. The fingers closed slowly on it and held — there was no other movement and no other glance.

  At Nsele, Ali was ensconced in a villa just across the street from the banks of the Zaïre. The interior of his house had been furnished by the government in style one might expect. Large rooms twice the size of motel rooms but identically depressing in mood commanded the air. Long sofas and chairs were covered in green velveteen, the floor was a plastic gray tile, the cushions were orange, the table dark brown — one was looking at that ubiquitous hotel furniture known to the wholesale trade as High Schlock.

  It was nine in the morning. Ali had been sleeping. If he looked better than at Deer Lake, the hint of a lack of full health still lingered. In fact, there had been news stories that his blood sugar was low, his energy poor, and he had been placed on a new diet. Still, there was no large improvement in his appearance.

  This morning he was twice depressed over Foreman’s cut. The fight had been hardly a week away. A TV correspondent, Bill Brannigan, who spoke to Ali just after he heard the news, was to remark, “It’s the first time I ever saw Ali have a genuine reaction.” How he was upset. “The worst of all times,” said Ali, “and the worst thing that could have happened. I feel as if somebody close to me just died.” Could it be the developing determination of his body that had just died, his difficult approach to good condition? But even to speak of good condition is to confront the first mystery of boxing. It is a rare state of body and mind that allows a Heavyweight to move at top speed for fifteen rounds. That cannot be achieved by an act of will. Yet Ali had been trying. For months he had trained.